The logics of the graphics card market and simplistic design should have sooner or later born unique Radeon HD 4800 modifications that would stand out among the numerous ATI reference solutions. One of solutions like that will be discussed today. It is the new Sapphire Toxic HD 4850 512MB GDDR3.

Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2142

This game doesn’t support display resolutions of 16:10 format, so we use resolutions of 4:3 format for it.

The Sapphire card is only 6-7% ahead of the reference Radeon HD 4850. The gap corresponds to the difference in their clock rates. Both cards ensure a frame rate of 70-80fps, so the Sapphire doesn’t provide any practical benefit here.

BioShock

BioShock doesn’t support FSAA when running in Windows Vista’s DirectX 10 environment. We benchmark graphics cards without FSAA in this game.

The Toxic HD 4850 is overtakes the more expensive GeForce GTX 260 in BioShock at a resolution of 1920x1200. However, the reference version from ATI ensures as much comfort as the Sapphire – you won’t feel any difference while playing this game. Obviously, such modest overclocking can’t do much good to the Radeon HD 4850. It had inherited this trait from its ancestors from the Radeon HD 3800 series.